Tag: horror

Is reality more terrifying than fiction? One Italian developer thinks so. And they’ve got big plans for the horror genre.

Italian game developer LKA is taking serious risks. In their upcoming horror game The Town Of Light, they’re recreating Volterra, an abandoned mental asylum in the Tuscany region of Italy.

Volterra is one of Italy’s darkest places. A psychiatric home that was abandoned in 1978, Volterra is called “The place of no return” because it was once home to 6000 patients who were never allowed to leave.

Known for its inhumane practices, Volterra echoes memories of its sinister past. The walls of a hospital courtyard are decorated with carvings of a patient who was locked up for more than ten years. Rooms are painted with lines of mysterious codes. Wheelchairs lie unoccupied, dust gathering on their wheels. Empty beds are turning to rust. It’s a place of an all too real horror.

Some critics will say that Volterra is too serious a subject for a game to tackle. But movies have been tackling similar themes for decades. Game developer are as talented as movie studios. They can likewise succeed in taking on such serious subjects.

For The Town Of Light to become a success it must marry the entertainment demaned by gamers with the sincerity demanded by the game’s subject.

Whether The Town Of Light ultimately pays the right respects to Volterra or not ultimately comes down to the direction LKA take. According to the game’s Steam Greenlight page, “The Town of Light is a first-person psychological experience with locations and characters inspired by real events. Our goal is to recreate the experiences, the anguish and the human drama of patients living in mental institutions up to the end of the last century: both the pain of mental disease and the horrors patients underwent within the walls of the institutions where they were being ‘treated’.”

The Town Of Light’s trailer helps to clarify things…

For The Town Of Light to succeed it’ll need to match entertainment with sensitivity, creating an enjoyable game while paying respect to its subject.

While games are capable of taking on such sensitive subjects as Volterra, it’s vital that the game developer pay the proper respects. To make a successful game while being respectful of the subject, developer LKA need to be artistic, intelligent, and more than anything, human.

Far from the melodrama of many of the genre’s titles, The Town Of Light is marked by realism. In placing The Town of Light in the genre, Alec Meer (@bonzrat) of RockPaperShotgun says, “Gone Home is a far more accurate touchstone than something like Silent Hill or Amnesia, despite some degree of aesthetic commonality with horror games. Architecturally at least, there is no dramatic license. The degradation, darkness and emptiness of the asylum is a replication of how Volterra appears now.”

Tom Sykes (@tomdavidsykes) of PC Gamer questions the direction The Town of Light is heading, but remains optimistic. “I’m not quite sure what The Town of Light is. Is it a horror game? Is it an adventure game…? We’ll know for sure in Autumn, which is when The Town of Light is due out, but for now I’m quietly hopeful about this game set in a real-world Italian asylum.

In an effort to show respects for the victims of Volterra, LKA games have been conducting extensive research.

Much of LKA’s efforts are being put into striking the perfect balance between realism and entertainment. The developer tells us that The Town Of Light is definitely a game, but at the same time it will faithfully recreate the asylum itself, even to the point of including many real life artefacts from Volterra. The game comments on how the institution was run, how the staff dehumanised patients, and what Meer calls, “the icy bureaucracy pasted over the top of Volterra’s atrocities”.

Perhaps the biggest issue that The Town of Light will face is the fact that horror games have desensitised people. While the event that took place at Volterra are doubtlessly disturbing in real life, translated into a game and catalogued adjacent to Silent Hill and City 17, we’re left wondering whether real life horrors are still capable of being disturbing when brought into the realm of entertainment. But that’s just another reason why The Town of Light is such a fascinating prospect. It poses so many questions.

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The Last of Us is one of the best games of 2013 and was made by video game developer Naughty Dog. An action adventure survival horror game with an excellent story, The Last Of Us was critically acclaimed and gave players one of the best gaming experiences of all time.

In the game you play Joel who is escorting Ellie over a post apocalyptic United States. You use guns and various improvised weapons to defeat humans and zombies as you try to stay alive in a world plagued by infection.

Catherine is a XBox 360 and PS3 game from video game developer Atlus, who also created Persona 3 and Persona 4. When you start playing Catherine you’ll be given four options: Babel, Colosseum, Golden Theatre and Configuration. In Golden Theatre you’ll play through the games story mode. Babel is full of complex puzzles which are randomised so they’re different each time you play.

Alice Madness Returns is the sequel to the PC game Alice by video game designer American McGee. Released for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in 2011, Alice Madness Returns earned a cult following for its unique game design.

Alice Madness Returns is about Alice Lidell, who went made after her parents and sister were killed in a fire. Madness Returns begins several years after Alice was released from the mental asylum. Alice seeks to return to Wonderland, her refugee, but it has been corrupted by an evil force.

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Silent Hill 2 comes in a respectable 6th place in our list of the best stories in video games. While there can be little doubt that Silent Hill 2’s protagonist Justin Sunderland is far from the best of lead characters, with dodgy dialogue and bad voice acting, Silent Hill 2 still manages to create… Read more »

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